Samuel S. Wilks

The Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Medal and Award was established in 1964 with a $5,000 gift from Mr. Philip B. Rust of Thomasville, Georgia. The original Wilks Memorial Medal Award, initiated jointly by the U.S. Army and the American Statistician Association (ASA), is administered by the ASA, a non-profit educational and scientific society founded in 1839. The Wilks Award is given each year to a statistician and is based primarily on his contribution to the advancement of scientific or technical knowledge in Army statistics, ingenious application of such knowledge, or successful activity in the fostering of cooperation scientific matters which coincidentally benefit the Army, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Government, and our country generally. For a discussion of Wilks’ contribution to Army statistics, the establishment of the conference, and the Wilks Award, please see this paper by Leslie Simon.

Army/ASA Wilks Memorial Award Winners

Frank E. Grubbs (1964)
Ballistic Research Laboratory
George W. Snedecor (1970)
Iowa State University
Solomon Kullback (1976)
George Washington University
John W. Tukey (1965)
Princeton University
Harold F. Dodge (1971)
Rutgers University and Bell Telephone Labs
Churchill Eisenhart (1977)
National Bureau of Standards
MG Leslie E. Simon (1966)
US Army (Ret’d)
George E.P. Box (1972)
University of Wisconsin
William H. Kruskal (1978)
University of Chicago
William G. Cochran (1967)
Harvard University
H.O. Hartley (1973)
Texas A&M University
Alexander M. Mood (1979)
University of California-Irvine
Jerzy Neyman (1968)
University of California-Berkeley
Cuthbert Daniel (1974)
Consultant
W. Allen Wallis (1980)
University of Rochester
W.J. Youden (1969)
National Bureau of Standards
Herbert Solomon (1975)
Stanford University

Philip Rust made another gift for the establishment of a second Wilks award, called “The Wilks Award for Contributions to Statistical Methodologies in Army Research, Development, and Testing.” The new Army Wilks Memorial Award is given periodically at the Defense and Aerospace Test and Analysis Workshop to a deserving individual who has made a substantial contribution to statistical methodology and application impacting the practice of statistics in the Army through personal research in statistics or application of statistics in the solution of Army problems. The award was established to commemorate the career of Prof. Samuel S. Wilks and especially his service to the Army.

Army Wilks Memorial Awards

Robert E. Bechhofer (1981)
Cornell University
Douglas Tang (1993)
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
Francisco Samaniego (2008)
University of California, Davis
Bernard Harris (1982)
University of Wisconsin
Jayaram Sethuraman (1994)
Florida State University
Donald P. Gaver (2009)
Naval Postgraduate School
Herbert A. David (1983)
Iowa State University
W. Jay Conover (1997)
Texas Tech University
Arthur Fries (2010)
Institute for Defense Analyses
Nozer Singpurwalla (1984)
George Washington University
Robert Launer (1998)
US Army Research Office
Bruce J. West (2011)
US Army Research Office
Emanuel Parzen (1985)
Texas A&M University
Edward Wegman (1999)
George Mason University
C.F. Jeff Wu (2012)
Georgia Institute of Technology
Francis G. Dressel (1986)
Duke University and US Army Research Office
C.R. Rao (2000)
University of Pittsburgh
Mou-Hsiung (Harry) Chang (2013)
US Army Research Office
J. Stuart Hunter (1987)
Princeton University
Eugene F. Dutoit (2002)
Fort Benning
Alyson G. Wilson (2015)
North Carolina State University
Marion R. Bryson (1988)
US Army Combat Development Experimentation Center
Donald R. Barr (2003)
US Military Academy
Paul Ellner (2020)
Army Materiel System Analysis Activity
Boyd Harshbarger (1989)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
David W. Scott (2004)
Rice University
COL Rodney Sturdivant (2021)
US Army (Ret'd) and Baylor University
James R. Thompson (1991)
Rice University
Barry A. Bodt (2006)
US Army Research Laboratory
William Q. Meeker (2023)
Iowa State University
Malcolm S. Taylor (1992)
US Army Research Office
Wei-Yin Loh (2007)
University of Wisconsin